Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com) [LWN.net]

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 10:48 UTC (Mon) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]

I tried to find out how it works too. Seems like you can type words faster by pressing more than one key at a time.

A layman explanation how that actually works would be nice. Couldn't something like this be used for coding?

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 13:46 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype, plus the demo: http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html might be illuminating.

It's an interesting idea. I doubt I'd have the dexterity/manual coordination for it personally since I've yet to master touch-typing after years of practice, but I can see why it's so useful for some professions.

Might not work so well for coding since it relies on standard abbreviations (it is a natural language shorthand machine, after all), but maybe something similar could work.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 14:34 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I think you are right about using this for coding, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3467782 - the time taken for thinking and debugging seems to far exceed actual typing time.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 21:33 UTC (Mon) by ploversteno (guest, #82336) [Link]

As I've argued, it's not so much the speed of composition that's important; it's the fluency that steno gives to turning thought into text. I'm still a novice programmer, so I don't generally use steno to write much code (though I certainly hope to in the future), but the difference in writing fiction was startling. Rather than spending time tip-tapping out each letter and backspacing a dozen times every time my mind outpaced my thoughts and I made a typo several words before I caught it, steno allowed me to write one stroke or less per syllable, giving a flow and ease to my prose composition that I never would have expected before I tried it.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 22:24 UTC (Mon) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]

Typing time can be a critical path in coding.

One of the things I have found that is possible with good typing speed is
when adapting a similar piece of code to a new purpose, it is possible to type the new piece of code by merely looking at the example, making the necessary changes to the new code along the way. Which at least find to be much less error prone.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 17, 2012 9:04 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> Typing time can be a critical path in coding.

One could explain it simply by an analogy to IO-bound and CPU-bound processes. IMO, using this analogy, coding is IO-bound while programming is CPU-bound :)

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 21:30 UTC (Mon) by ploversteno (guest, #82336) [Link]

While the steno keyboard layout is standard, its dictionary can be customized to produce any output; it's not restricted to English words or punctuation. From my article "Writing and Coding" in my "What is Steno Good For Series" (http://plover.stenoknight.com/2010/04/writing-and-coding-...):

"In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like D*FD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes."

Here are some slides from the talk I gave at PyGotham, talking about the potential of Plover in coding: http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverpresentation.pdf

(the entire video of the talk can be found here: http://plover.stenoknight.com/2011/10/captioned-pygotham-...)

Further resources to use with the interactive Plover demo linked above:

http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Quick_References

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 22:16 UTC (Mon) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]

How frequent are chords where you have to press two keys with the same finger?

I have been experimenting with my lenovo laptop keyboard to get an idea of what kind of chords it can deal with. So far it appears I can handle any chord that would be needed for braille writing. AKA I can mash the 6 home keys or any combination of them all at the same time and see all of the letters come out. Where things start failing is when I start mashing
two keys with the same finger. The keyboard will not register the
qwerty combination wsed which map to the steno keys TKPW-.

Additionally it appears that to type multiple keys with the same finger requires a very different hand positioning and typing style then standard typing. Whereas a limitation of one key with a finger would not require much of a change.

I expect the answer is that typing multiple keys with the same finger is a core component in steno style typing (516096 vs 65610 combinations) and it just isn't worth playing games trying to get keyboards with less than n-key rollover on the "steno" keys to be a primary platform for using plover.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 23:51 UTC (Mon) by ploversteno (guest, #82336) [Link]

I have a Lenovo laptop, and I agree that it's insufficient for use in steno. A single finger will press a maximum of two keys at a time, but since multiple fingers will be in play for each stroke, n-key rollover is definitely required. Fortunately the Microsoft Sidewinder X4 is only $45, and the even nicer (and more compact) Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless is a less affordable but not astronomical $120. Both of these keyboards work quite well with Plover in strokes containing up to 20 keys pressed at a time. As a professional stenographer, I'm able to get pretty good speed and accuracy writing steno on a qwerty keyboard with n-key rollover, though it's still clunkier and more awkward than with my $4,000 proprietary steno machine. We're hoping that once Plover gets an established user base of amateurs employing the n-key rollover qwerty keyboards that we'll be able to market a low-cost USB steno machine for use with Plover that'll have a proper steno machine layout with columns of rectangular keys rather than the misaligned square keys of the qwerty keyboard.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 17, 2012 8:54 UTC (Tue) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link]

Looks to me as being trained as a piano player is a better background for steno-typing than having a formal touch-training. ;-)

(I am using what I call piano-touch, moving the hands a bit back and forth to use the fingers as effenciently as possible, being a right-hander typing a bit more with the right than the left hand - would probably annoy a formally trained touch typist, but works really well for me (just realising that I knew where all the keys were, using all fingers and then just getting rid of the habit of looking at the keyboard while typing) - seems like using chords would be the next natural step (just a pity I do most of the typing at work, being forced to use a windows machine))

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 17, 2012 0:56 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Uhm. A good language and IDE with autcomplete allow you to do the same.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 14:30 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Stenographic keyboards are expensive hardware+software ($1000 to $4000 US) that simply enable fast transcription of speech through chord-based keyboarding, i.e. many keys pressed at once per syllable.

Plover is a FOSS application that lets (almost) any Qwerty keyboard be used with a Linux system in place of this expensive setup.

The 'almost' refers to the fact that not all keyboards properly support keyboarding, hence the author recommends a $45 gaming keyboard. Apparently "anti ghosting" is another name for this "supports chording" feature.

One of the most interesting things about Plover is that the author hopes to get far more people trained in stenography, by removing the equipment cost barrier. However it still takes a long time to fully learn how to type in this format.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 16:16 UTC (Mon) by ajb (subscriber, #9694) [Link]

'Almost all' may be optimistic. I suspect that most commodity keyboards do not support N-key rollover. Nevertheless, $45 for a gaming keyboard is a great improvement over $4000.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 17:30 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Good point - this has some more info on N-key rollover and a JavaScript test: http://www.renoise.com/indepth/equipment/crippled-chords-...

Apparently the USB protocol limits N-key rollover to 6 keys in any case.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 21:36 UTC (Mon) by ploversteno (guest, #82336) [Link]

I've heard about the 6-key limit, but it doesn't appear to be true. Both the $45 Sidewinder X4 and the $120 Filco Majestouch I've tried (connected via USB) with Plover are able to register up to 20 keys pressed simultaneously. So I don't know whether these hardware manufactures have figured out a way around the purported 6-key limit or if the limit doesn't actually exist, but I haven't personally encountered it.

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system (Opensource.com)

Posted Jan 16, 2012 22:21 UTC (Mon) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

> I've heard about the 6-key limit, but it doesn't appear to be true.

It's not. The USB HID specification has a fixed "keyboard boot protocol" format that's used to simplify BIOS and similar limited USB implementations. That boot protocol defines a standard fixed-format report that holds a maximum of 6 simultaneous keypresses. As soon as you decide not to use the boot protocol, you're free to define whatever report format you'd like, and you could easily stuff 20 or more keypresses in there.